MURDERS IN CANADA.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 483, 25 June 1890, Page 5

MURDERS IN CANADA.

RIVAL OF THE BENWELL TRAGEDY. YOUNG KIMBER’S BODY IN A RESERVOIR. The parallel of the Benwell case—the Kimber mystery—which has been puzzling Montreal detectives since the beginning of April, has moved one step towards solution. The body of T. S. Kimber has been found in the upper reservoir, which supplies the high-toned part of the city with water. The Benwell case, which excited so much interest all over the country, was at its height when the disappearance of another young Englishman, who was accompanied across the ocean by three companions, excited some suspicion. Peter Schoenfield, editor of the Canadian “ Workman,” was the first to make any suggestion of foul play, and, on inquiry, he placed the case in the hands of detectives.

On the following Friday he left mysteriously, leaving behind him in his room a large quantity of blood with which the floor and various articles of furniture were bespattered, besides a blood-stained razor and several bloody handkerchiefs.

The first facts discovered were to the effect that Thomas S. Kimber, of Topsham, Devonshire, England, arrived in this city on April 3rd, and registered at the Grand Central Hotel with three companions. Somehow his disappearance was kept quiet for about two weeks. Styles, exproprietor of the Grand Central Hotel, on April 29th made a statement. “On the morning of the 11th inst.,” he said: “between 10 and 11 o’clock, I distinctly saw Kimber leave the house, and was naturally not unduly alarmed when blood was later discovered in his room.

“ For two or three days I expected him to return, and certainty it was not my business to endeavour to create a sensation about a man who might at any moment turn up. I then told his friend, Shoenfield, of the facts.”

From this time out the newspapers hunted the matter up. The detectives had their usual clues. Letters were written to England, and answers received, but all to no purpose, and the matter had been given up as a mystery until a stonemason, named Berchiron, passing by the high level reservoir, noticed a human body floating in the water.

The body was fished out, the coroner notified and the body taken to the morgue. For one reason or another not explained, the coroner’s jury railroaded through a verdict of suicide almost immediately. The jury was empannelledatß o’clock, and at 10 they had brought in a verdict of suicide before an autopsy had been made. When the body was found it was discovered that the throat had four distinct cuts, which had severed the windpipe. Around the wound was tightly tied a towel bearing the name “T. Styles,” the proprietor of the Grand Central Hotel, and in the coat pockets were stones which weighed almost twenty pounds. On his undershirt was marked “ T. Kimber.” When Kimber’s room in the Grand Central Hotel was broken into and blood was found all over the floor and spattered on the wall, the theory was formed, with the aid of the hotelkeeper, that he had been seized with a hemorrhage and left without paying the few days’ board he owed. On the day of his disappearance a draft arrived from his father in England, and the question now is—Was that draft the cause of the murder ?

Here is the theory of the mystery which Detective Grose gives, and the above conversation about the reservoir carries it out: Kimber left the hotel in the morning, met his two companions, or somebody else who had the scheme planned beforehand, and had taken a towel from the hotel to help out their plans. He was enticed to a lonely point of Mount Royal, where the reservoir is, his throat cut, his neck wrapped tightly round with a stolen towel, his pockets filled with stones and his body thrown over the rails into the water.

The murderers went back to the hotel, spattered blood about the floor, locked the door and left. This would account for no trace of blood being found outside the door.